After surviving the crazy weather on Sunday, it was back on the bus down to Austin on Monday. Diana was kind enough to drop me off on her way to downtown Dallas. Having caught up on work emails and the like pretty quickly, I was able to spend the rest of the 3 hour journey reading. Several New Yorker magazines were waiting for me amidst the mail stack in Dallas and I worked my way through some of those on the drive. I smiled at this typical New Yorker cartoon as it reminded me of losing to McD at the puzzle yesterday:
My arrival at the Catherine on Monday night was greeted by six packages that needed hauling up to the apartment. Thank goodness for the hotel valet style trolley that they make available. This time most of the boxes were of my own doing – cushions, a painting, and a lampshade to finish out my interior decorating. I think they all look quite nice.
After work on Tuesday I enjoyed a dinner with colleagues Heather, Vinod and Jeff at Shady Grove. The hatch chile sauce grilled chicken is my favourite.
Patty, Brent and Diana all arrived in Austin on Thursday for a long weekend. They share our love for good and interesting food, and we ate well all weekend long.
The dining extravaganza started at Peche with steak tartare, deviled eggs, and an excellent duck dish that McD and I shared.
John “Papa” Gros, an excellent New Orleans keyboard player, was performing at the legendary Antone’s club when we finished dinner. He has a great funky sound and a band that does a wonderful job on the New Orleans classics. Fortunately we did a lot of walking every day of the weekend to counteract all the excellent food and drinks consumed..
Antone’s was very quiet and so we were able to move around easily and enjoy the band. Here’s a video of “Papa” Gros doing “Tipitina”, the Professor Longhair classic:
Work called me to the office on Friday morning and Diana was busy with calls. Patty and Brent entertained themselves with a South Congress ramble – they made it at least as far as Torchy’s tacos. It’s so nice being able to walk to so many interesting places. For dinner, Brent fancied some good Mexican and our combined research indicated that ATX (Austin, Texas) Cocina might be a good destination.
We walked across the 1st Street bridge to find an hour wait at ATX Cocina. No issue, Diana and I went around the corner to Le Politique (a very nice French restaurant find) for a drink while Patty and Brent did some shopping. Dinner was well worth the wait. Brent was quite pleased to find the entire menu gluten free – go nuts, have whatever you want. The dishes were all very fresh, interesting, and with excellent sauces. A really creative and different menu in a very modern and popular setting.
After the walk back, we rewarded ourselves with a drink at the Catherine sky bar. It was a perfect evening for the sky bar and we enjoyed looking over the “Urban Old Skool” music festival going on next door at Auditorium Shores.
Saturday started with workouts and some of my special breakfast tacos, which seemed to be well received. We enjoyed looking down on the “National Taco Championship” in the parking lot of the Austin American Statesman. This not only included a taco championship, but also Mexican wrestling and a chihuahua beauty parade. You can almost spot the wrestlers with their masks in the picture.
Shortly after this, things started to come off the rails a bit. The VW Passat has a feature that prevents clowns from locking their car keys in the trunk. Honestly, I’ve seen it in action a few times – the trunk just pops back up when you try to close it. Not this time – my jacket with keys in the pocket was firmly locked in the trunk. “Where are the spare keys?”, I hear you asking. In Dallas – so not too convenient.
After some solid huffing and puffing between Diana and me, the trio walked into downtown Austin for shopping while I called AAA. Less than an hour later things were starting to get back on the rails. The AAA tow truck driver had the door opened within a minute of arrival and the interior trunk button did not require the engine to be on to operate. Whew!
I drove over to downtown to pick up the shoppers who had spent quite a bit of money on jewelry and ceramic bats. We had a small naming contest for the blue ceramic bat that now nests in our desk area. After some initial rejections, Brent came up with a winner. “He’s into the blues, so he must be Bats Domino”. Perfect! And another example of that amazing piece of human anatomy that is Brent’s brain.
We had lunch at the original Taco Deli just before it closed for the day at 3pm and then paid a brief visit to my office. Then we had time for a quick stop at Cosmic coffee before heading back to get ready for dinner.
Dinner was at Juliet Italian, which fortunately is almost a mile walk from the Catherine. We all loved our food and had lots of leftovers to carry home. The cioppino was a particular highlight and I loved my mushroom fettuccine. A night at Juliet wouldn’t be complete without a visit to the Carpenter next door to play a record. This time, Al Green was Patty’s choice.
Sunday morning was a repeat of Saturday morning and then we walked down to El Alma for brunch. What a great place with an excellent menu. Diana and I split the benedict with corn cake, chipotle hollandaise, and crab (ridiculously good) and a side of mushroom stuffed empanadas.
After brunch we attended a “special event” – the annual Austin kite festival. Diana bought me a kite on the walk along Barton Springs to Zilker Park and I had a great time joining the thousands of other folks enjoying kite flying. What type of kite do you think would be most appropriate for an Austin festival?
Did you guess on a kite type? Here it is:
Yes – it’s a bat with a nice long tail. Here’s a view of all the other kites. Lots of very impressive flying machines.
On the walk back to the apartment, I came across this sign. What are your thoughts?
And then we posed the girls next to Patty’s favourite food truck.
After the long walk back (at least a mile and a half), we enjoyed a low key dinner and a movie. Then we ventured across the street to see if we could see the bats flying for the first time. There is a colony of over 500,000 bats that nest under the Congress Street bridge and are quite the tourist attraction. No bats flew on Saturday night due to the cold, blustery weather and so we weren’t sure we’d see any on Sunday either. The sun had almost set by the time the first few bats ventured out and then many more of them took flight. It’s tough to capture them in a photo due to the flight speed but you can see some little smudges (if you zoom way in) in the picture where they are moving.
This boat was positioned directly in the flight path while the bats emerged – good way to see the show.
We shut things down pretty early on Sunday night since we had a 5:30am start on Monday morning.
What a lovely visit we had with our first Austin overnight guests. We’re ready for the next set – get your dates booked early!
I listened to “Carolina Confessions” by the Marcus King Band on the bus down to Austin and this song really caught my attention (the entire album is very good):
I always forget about Joan Armatrading when selecting some music to play. Very silly of me because whenever she shows up on a playlist I remember how much I’ve missed hearing her unique sound. Here’s an example from a Spotify playlist this week:
This piece from Joe Henderson is recorded live at the Village Vanguard (I used to love visiting this joint when travelling to New York) and features the amazing Ron Carter (regular readers will remember my rave review of his concert at Birdland last year) on bass. I love the bass chords that he constructs.
This song popped up on an episode of Billions that I was watching on TV. They typically use interesting music throughout the show.
And here’s another one from Billions (later in the same show) from the excellent Little Steven. Guitar player for whom?
If you didn’t know – Little Steven Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren have been the guitar players for Bruce Springsteen for many years.